Ecommerce Search 26.7

Changes

New features

Redirects: a search phrase can redirect to a URL

A phrase mapping can now redirect to a URL instead of a page derived from the product catalog. This covers phrases such as "opening hours", "customer service", and "delivery terms", which refer to pages around the catalog and have no product-shaped destination. A relative URL points at a page on the shop itself, and an absolute URL points at a page outside it.

URL redirects are configured as phrase mappings in the Admin API and are gated by the new urlRedirectsEnabled redirect setting, which controls both whether the type can be configured and whether published URL mappings are honoured in live search. There is no automatic resolution for URL redirects, because Ecommerce Search holds no data from which a URL could be inferred — an administrator states the target explicitly. A URL is validated for format only.

FieldName and FieldValueId on the phrase mapping models are now optional, since a URL mapping has no field target. They remain required when RedirectType is FieldValue.

The phrase mapping and redirect settings endpoints are part of the experimental v26-preview Admin API. See Redirects and Handling Redirects for the full description.

Enhancements

Search API: redirect type stated on the redirect action

The action.redirect object on the unified search response now states which kind of redirect fired. Exactly one of filters, relativeUrl, and absoluteUrl is populated, as stated by redirectType.

The change is additive. filters is still populated for every redirect kind that existed before, so an integration that ignores redirectType is unaffected. Storefronts that want to support URL redirects should switch on redirectType and treat an unrecognized value as no redirect. The properties are added to the v26 Search API and are available in the Bizzkit.Sdk.Search C# SDK.

Search API: quick search can return a redirect action

Quick search previously never returned action.redirect; it applied the redirect filters internally and returned the matching products. A URL redirect has nothing to apply against the index, so quick search returns the action with no products, no content, and zero totals. Field-value redirects in quick search are unchanged.

An empty quick search response that carries an action object is not a no-results response. Since the user is still typing, presenting the destination in the dropdown is usually preferable to navigating away unprompted; immediate navigation remains the natural behavior for full search. This only occurs once a segment has a published URL phrase mapping and urlRedirectsEnabled switched on, so no action is required from integrations that do not use URL redirects.

Deprecations

None.